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Comment by wing-_-nuts | Hacker News Reader

I recently switched to an arch flavor because the AUR had a lot of little small utilities that make life better on wayland. Also, it's quite easy to install the latest version of golang and rust, etc.

Pros: Documentation is excellent. Better than even Gentoo or Ubuntu's docs.

Cons: Arch doesn't have an installer, and seems almost militantly against providing one, or a lot of other little utilities that could improve the user experience. I get the same sort of 'I suffered, therefore you must suffer, learn to RTFM noob' elitism that I saw with slackware 20 years ago. I'm a grizzled vet, I can figure this stuff out, but it doesn't help your average technically literate joe.

Updates seem to break for odd reasons. I had to uninstall nodejs to be able to do a system update. Why? There should be some sort of automated way to address this.

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> Arch doesn't have an installer, and seems almost militantly against providing one, or a lot of other little utilities that could improve the user experience

This just changed! The archinstall package is included on install media now and is not considered experimental (according to the wiki page history, that happened on 2022-07-08).

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/archinstall

Huh, it took a while for the wiki to be updated to reflect that. The official announcement was on april 1st, 2021 (the date was almost certainly a joke of how unexpected it was to people now following its development, but the release was no joke): https://archlinux.org/news/installation-medium-with-installe...

Welp, looks like I'm switching back from Manjaro for my next Linux install.

I recently adopted Arch onto my laptop and didn't even realize 'archinstall' wasn't always a thing. I looked up a traditional Arch installation and think I might have skipped it had the installer not been present when I was distro hopping.

Yes, it does a quite decent job of getting you up and running with a bootloader and disk encryption all configured. From there, you can just bootstrap the rest. But that was the main reason for me to pick Manjaro half a year ago.

I would like to defend arch here.

In my experience, Arch's main focus is on upholding a simple consistent architecture. There are tools that do something like the bare minimum required work, and then excellent documentation so that the end user can correctly perform the remaining required work manually (or via their own scripts).

As a result, there are certain features that will probably never be implemented. For example, if you wait too long between upgrades, your signing keys will be out of date. The solution is to upgrade the "archlinux-keyring" package first. Should pacman automatically do this? It would be nice, but it would also introduce a special case into pacman. Would that special case be abused to do unexpected things?

Another example is installers. Writing a basic installer for a single machine is easy. Writing an installer that covers any machine is very hard. Writing an installer that covers any machine with any configuration the user might want is impossible.

Put another way, everyone likes that Arch has up to date packages and an excellent wiki. Would either of these exist if there was a bunch of extra complexity that needed to be integrated? Is there any need for an excellent wiki if installers automatically resolve all your problems?

> Another example is installers. Writing a basic installer for a single machine is easy. Writing an installer that covers any machine is very hard. Writing an installer that covers any machine with any configuration the user might want is impossible.

This is a cop out. An installer doesn't need to cover every option a user might want. An installer only covering popular options/configurations is only a problem if the installer is the only way to install the system. If it's just an option itself during the install there's no issue. The weird corner case can still be handled manually while more common options can be handled by an installer.

I'd call it more likely a form a neurosis than a cop-out.

It can be hard to resist some analysis paralysis when faced with an incredibly broad problem. There's a strong urge to find one solution to cover all cases. Trying to do everything at once being so overwhelming that it's impossible to get even started on it.

Of course, you're correct that the best thing to carve out the most common cases and then iterate. I've found that it takes time and experience to gain the wisdom to learn the perfect is the enemy of the good.

arch used to have an installer. it didn't work for everyone, and caused a lot of complaining. turned out most people could do the steps themselves.

it has an installer again. maybe the userbase will change.

I think the historical opposition of Arch devs to an installer is more maintenance. Most advanced users end up scripting their own specific system or getting a muscle memory for installing it (and that’s if they install Arch frequently at all).

Most if not all Arch devs are likely advanced users, they didn’t need to maintain a user friendly installer for themselves so the old one got out of date and was removed.

What’s probably changed recently is that Arch has grown enough to get devs/trusted users who actually wanted to write and maintain an installer, so now it has one.

I find the Arch dev justification/perspective for most things much better than many users on the forums who tend to pick up the basic idea and cargo cult it whilst losing the context behind it.

Being that Arch is maintained with arch users in mind[0], building an installer for that user base would have to entail a wide range of option for unique use cases because that's whats expected of their users[1]. There isn't a "cop-out" or "plea" to users outside of the community because it was never a goal to appease them.

[0]https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Arch_Linux#User_centrality

[1] https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Arch_Linux#Versatility

No, it wouldn't, because that versatility can be attained by... not using the installer, the exact same as the situation without an installer.

An installer, if anything, improves "user centrality" because you're making it more accessible and usable to most users with just the most common few options.

Not having an installer improves "dev centrality" (the few users who matter are the devs and other advanced users), over and against user centrality.

You could use the same thinking to argue against having a package manager. You might have to install a package manually anyway, so why bother providing packages at all?

At the end of the day, as others have probably already said in this thread, the maintainers are unpaid volunteers and choose to focus on certain things for their own reasons and using their finite resources.

There are other distributions that focus on other things and people can choose. If Arch chose to implement lots of convenience functions, that choice could be to the detriment of other strong aspects of the distribution.

…which they chose to use to write an installer for Arch after all, so I find your arguments against it somewhat amusing.

I am aware of the fact that they wrote an installer. I do not think this invalidates my previous comment though.

>Arch's main focus is on upholding a simple consistent architecture

I though it is all about doing it the upstream way.

That's the flip side of the coin.

I love that Arch has no extra configuration system. I'm building Debian images at work for like three years now and still don't really get how debconf works.

Also, the amount of patches, workarounds and custom configuration files in most packages and maintainer scripts is just wild. Coming from more than ten years of Arch, it took me a while to learn to check the debian packaging source if upstream doesn't match the behaviour on my system.

They're talking about an installer for Arch itself (which could and should support the bare minimum options that most users want), which is what it didn't have until recently; not installers for packages within Arch, which it has always had.

So, would it add a bunch of extra complexity? Not really; it's actually tiny compared to making a package manager and maintaining its library.

Would it take away from maintaining the package library? I guess a bit.

Would there still be a need for documentation? Of course.

also, keys: https://lists.archlinux.org/archives/list/arch-dev-public@li...

There actually is an optional installer included with the official installation media now [1].

[1] https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/archinstall

This must be new, but it's definitely a step in the right direction.

The previous installer was deprecated in 2012, so a 10 year period of no installer.

Quite a good video about it - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OtWWLN3wGNE

Used it to create a dual boot on my main machine and works a charm.

Sounds like the installer is not ready for regular users yet.

That was a few months ago, there's been improvements since.

There're some Arch-derived distros that are basically just Arch + some choices made for you + an installer, like https://endeavouros.com/

This is exactly what I'm running :^)

Should have scrolled down before replying. I agree endeavour is excellent.

Another vote for Endeavour.

I already run Ubuntu on my NUC, and when I was looking around to install on my former gamebox (i.e. computer with a graphics card unlike NUC with onboard graphics only) I wanted something with good steam/nvidia integration. It came down to either Pop! OS or Endeavor... because while I develop software I also want to play games without futzing around too much.

Very happy with Endeavour: pacman or yay for nearly everything, no hassle graphics drivers updates (system always suggests a reboot after and I always do that).

For me, Manjaro has been a fantastic base on top of Arch to start with- installer, desktop configured for the flavor you pick, and things Just Work out of the box, including the usual suspects like wifi, media keys (speakers, backlight, etc).

My only real complaint was that I wanted to do a fairly extensive change to the sway configs, and tracking down where they put all the config files took a bit of time.

But with Manjaro you don't have to personally babysit every computer in the house. Imagine not having your wife and/or child mad after the occasional update breaks things and they're helpless because they simply refuse to get intimate with the OS their own computer! What kind of world would that be?

Well, the wife has a chromebook, and the kid is moved out on her own and pretty much only uses a phone anyway, so it's a pretty nice world, to be honest :)

At some point I'm tempted to get a fat server going so I can do my dev work remotely to it using a super light weight / long battery life laptop, but that's a complication too far at the moment.

> At some point I'm tempted to get a fat server going so I can do my dev work remotely to it using a super light weight / long battery life laptop, but that's a complication too far at the moment.

A setup like that would be quite cool -- if it weren't for one problem: All the "super light weight / long battery life" laptops have tiny (= max 13-14 inch) screens; there don't seem to be any 16(or more!)-inch ones. OK, just the bigger screen and housing means a machine like that couldn't be as super light weight as a smaller one, but they could still be quite light weight...

Only machines like that don't seem to exist. Or does anybody know of some?

I think you misunderstood the point of the distribution. There's no installer because Arch developers have no need of one. They're creating the distribution for themselves, and if you find it useful (I do), that's great. There's no expectation that an "average technically literate joe" is going to use it because he's not in its target group.

Arch isn't some small LFS niche distro anymore. At a certain point, you have to embrace at least some small amount of usability, or at least not reject PRs to add it. I found it quite embarrassing when one of the most popular distros out there had a worse installer than deb or slack from 20 years ago. That's not 'oops we forgot', it's not 'it was never really a priority' that's blatant user hostile elitism.

actually no you don't have to go change your project's philosophy bc different ppl start using it and demand different stuff. this is the kind of attitude that makes ppl hate maintaining FOSS anything.

> blatant user hostile elitism

...and that's a feature. There's nothing wrong with Arch doing its thing, there's always Debian/Ubuntu/Fedora/Manjaro/whatever - and Gentoo for those with taste.

It's "maintaining an installer is a tedious chore I don't want to do as my hobby." Not elitism, eventually they did attract someone who wanted to maintain an installer as their hobby and now they have archinstall.

Any decent installer is non-trivial code and you cannot expect unpaid volunteers to write or maintain code that they don’t want to write or maintain.

I don’t see what the size of the distro has to do with it. Regardless of size, if there are users who have the time commitment and knowledge necessary to get commit rights and build and maintain an installer (as there is now), then it will have one. Otherwise it will not.

There’s no user hostility necessary for this sequence of events to happen.

That is only true if the Arch developers seek user growth beyond the niche they currently have. You are not entitled to them spending their time to meet your demand, though you are free to build your own distribution on top of it (or use one of the many available ones).

I don't think you should be embarrassed. An offer to provide code review, continuing development, and community support for this new feature is quite generous of you. They might not have decided to prioritize it, but at least you can be proud of the fact that you aren't just nitpicking from the sidelines, right?

> that's blatant user hostile elitism

A small amount of elitism is okay. For example, the Arch Wiki requires users to run a simple command before it allows them to create an account:

  pacman -V|base32|head -1

That command more or less proves the user has successfully installed Arch Linux. People who can't provide that output probably shouldn't be editing the wiki. I realize it's nowhere near a perfect proof but it's probably fine for the wiki's purposes.

You just proved parent's point.

Except there is an installer now, so your arguments against it are moot.

I don't know that it's elitism so much as not an interesting problem to solve. Like a lot of software, it's straightforward to automate the easy parts of an installer. But for it to work reliably, you have to account for so many corner cases and that it can become tedious and take a lot of dedication to get right. I think most Arch maintainers would rather spend their time working on Pacman or system stability issues that benefit themselves rather than new users.

I think most people who want easy access to Arch just go with Manjaro, which is close enough and gives you access to the AUR.

Endeavour os lets you install barbones arch if you untick enough checkboxes in the installer, I tried manjaro but they put on too much extra stuff

As a Linux noob i actually picked arch because it doesn't have an installer. Just installing arch I learned a lot about how computers work and how much is actually done by other operating systems like windows. I just followed the installation article in the wiki and didn't have any issues I couldn't solve. There are plenty of nicer distros for people that just want to use Linux. In my field of work RTFM is pretty standard so I don't mind it in the arch community.

You should try Linux from Scratch.

Seconded. It's a terrible end-user experience, but a fascinating and extremely educational project for a developer/sysadmin.

> Updates seem to break for odd reasons. I had to uninstall nodejs to be able to do a system update. Why? There should be some sort of automated way to address this.

That usually happens when a package depends on a specific version of a dependency, with e newer (major) version in the repo.

It should only be an issue if you're using AUR packages or other package management systems. Official packages are updated for new dependencies afaik.

For the most part that does seem to be the case. Though I have had problems with Qbittorrent and qt6 not playing nicely unless i hold back qt6. Seems to be resolved now

i am in favor of gatekeeping out ppl who are completely unwilling to go read the extremely helpful and well maintained wiki. it helps maintain a better atmosphere and keeps the forums clean(er) of the same 10 noob questions that everyone asks without looking for prior responses.

Arch has installer since April 2021 https://archlinux.org/news/installation-medium-with-installe...

The thing is that it used to have an installer that was removed at some point. It was a simple menu that just covered the basics and would leave you with a working system withing minutes. I don't know why it was ever removed.

> I recently switched to an arch flavor because the AUR had a lot of little small utilities that make life better on wayland.

Same for me after more than a decade on Ubuntu. Switched to Manjaro Sway so I could have a better life in Wayland.

If you want an installer and some utilities to make life a bit easier while staying on arch I can recommend endeavouros. It is really just vanilla arch with an installer and some convenience packages.

Arch actually now has an installer script built into the installation ISO.

Installers often get configured for the average user, and the average user doesn't exist. Also remember to do a full system backup before you upgrade!

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